so it turns out the connector soldered + glued to the leds (out of the box) was on the wrong end. it needed the arrows on the led strip to point AWAY from the microcontroller (thanks @ahnlak for pointing this out on discord)
so with that in mind, it now works, but the leds aren’t powered until the end of the strip, and they’re not very bright, do I need an additional power supply for these?